With the recent emergence of many important specialized product niches in the food marketplace, and the development of many non-traditional flour substances, commercial baking is going through a sea change revolution.
In particular, the growth segments in the baking industry now involve the creation of healthful products that are “gluten-free,” “dairy-free,” “egg-free,” “vegan,” and “allergy-friendly.” The development of such products (referred to herein individually and collectively as “non-traditional”) often requires new approaches to both product formulation and product manufacture, most notably the elimination of traditional baking ingredients such as wheat, barley, rye, butter, eggs, and/or other dairy and animal products. As these basic ingredients are central to the baking tradition, it may be more difficult to produce baked goods, such as cookies, crackers, pretzels, and the like, without using traditional ingredients like gluten or dairy products such as milk, butter, and eggs, which may provide texture and cohesion to dough. Yet many consumers (e.g., for health reasons) may need to eliminate gluten, dairy, animal products, and other substances that occur in traditional food offerings, but that cause allergic reactions or offend modern ethical sensibilities. In particular, gluten may produce an allergic or an autoimmune reaction, commonly referred to as Celiac Disease, among an increasing number of individuals, giving cause to their need for “gluten-free” baked goods.
To meet the needs of these important emerging markets, food companies are developing and manufacturing complex new non-traditional dough or batters with properties that are substantially different from traditional mixtures. However, long-standing baking knowledge and manufacturing technology is based almost entirely on the gluten properties of traditional, wheat-based products. Non-traditional flour substances, such as brown rice flour, quinoa, nut flours, and dried vegetable flours, may not be suited to traditional systems and methods of manufacture, thus requiring new manufacturing processes for the substantially different non-traditional products. In particular, conventional dough depositor production equipment is often inadequate to deal with the increasingly complex and difficult to manufacture dough that is created for non-traditional products. Uncommon product ingredients may result in tacky, tough, and inflexible dough which requires a different manufacture.
For instance, the cookie making properties of traditional cookie dough and non-traditional cookie dough are widely disparate, resulting in a substantially different manufacture. Broadly speaking, traditional gluten levels, such as is found in wheat flour, create lighter dough, with lower density, less stickiness, and an airy texture. Non-traditional cookie dough made without gluten-containing ingredients may be heavier by volume, can be very tacky, dense, or even hard in texture. Thus it may be much harder to process non-traditional dough with machinery designed for traditional dough to get an acceptable through-put.
Also, gluten containing traditional dough may provide less and slower dough spread rates on the cookie sheet because the water in the recipe becomes bound-up with the gluten, resulting in a uniform hydrolization, and an easily handled and formed dough. However, non-traditional dough may be intractable in a dough ball, and may lack the customary stretch of traditional dough. Further still, once non-traditional dough is separated into small pieces, as in cookie baking, the small pieces of dough may spread on a cooking surface because the water in the non-traditional dough is not bound-up with a bonding substance. Therefore, when manufacturing cookies from non-traditional dough dropped onto a pan, the dropped dough must be baked as soon as possible to arrest spread and retain shape. Research suggests that non-traditional dough spreads may be as much as 65% greater than are those of traditional, gluten-containing dough.
Traditional, gluten cookie dough absorbs more water and it does it more quickly, while a non-traditional, gluten-free formulation may take up to 60% longer to absorb water, meaning that in manufacturing, gluten dough can be handled throughout the baking process without substantial loss of water, while non-traditional dough may begin to seep liquid once the dough ball begins to be processed. Gluten also influences the incorporation of air into the respective dough, with traditional gluten dough capturing more air and allowing a fluffier dough. Accordingly, gluten dough may be softer than non-traditional, gluten-free dough. Finally, the degree of stickiness is low in traditional gluten dough, because gluten has been shown to absorb twice its weight in water, while non-traditional dough may absorb only about one-third its weight in water. Thus, non-traditional dough may be more leathery, and hard to work with in manufacturing.